case

SMU-21-0004

This case was written by Wong Yuet Nan, Associate Professor Hoe Siu Loon and Dr Jovina Ang at Singapore Management University. The case was prepared solely to provide material for class discussion. The authors do not intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The authors may have disguised certain names and other identifying information to protect confidentiality. Copyright © 2021, Singapore Management University Version: 2021-05-21

BUS UNCLE CHATBOT – CREATING A SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL BUSINESS (C)

October 2017 – It had been four months since Abhilash had resigned from TradeGecko and

working full-time on Bus Uncle. Never was there a dull day for him. He was loving it and learning

a great deal about conversational chatbots. He continued to pursue his speaking engagements to

raise the awareness of Bus Uncle and widen his network in Singapore and abroad.

Abhilash also launched the Bus Uncle website for users to find the chatbot more easily. At the

website, he showed the many features of Bus Uncle and provided an easy contact form for his

potential advertising clients (see Exhibit 1).

However, even though the advertising business had continued to trickle in, money was tight. He

needed to think about another revenue stream for his business. As he only had two years of work

experience before venturing out on his own, Abhilash needed guidance. What should he do?

Email from Entrepreneur First

An unexpected email arrived in Abhilash’s inbox on 16 October 2017. It had an interesting subject

line: “Coffee with EF?”

Abhilash immediately opened the email and found an invitation for him to apply to join

Entrepreneur First (EF), a start-up accelerator that had been founded by Matt Clifford and Alice

Bentinck in London in 2011.1 The company had launched its first international branch in

Singapore in 2016, in partnership with Infocomm Investments, later renamed SG Innovate.2

The mission of EF was to help talented individuals find co-founders, develop ideas, and provide

access to a pool of investors across the world. Aspiring and talented individuals were encouraged

to apply to participate in the structured EF six-month programme. Throughout the programme,

they would be supported by a global network of dedicated founders, advisors, venture partners

and investors. EF would even cover the living costs while the individuals tested their ideas for

their start-ups. If EF deemed that the start-up had the potential to succeed, the company would

provide further funding in exchange for 10 percent equity in the start-up.3

Hungry for guidance, Abhilash signed up for the programme and was selected to participate in

the third Singapore cohort. At EF, Abhilash met Meraj Qazi, who became his first co-founder

partner. Even though Meraj was non-technical, he was passionate about technology and had a

1 Sainual Abudheen K, “A Sneak-peak at Entrepreneur First Singapore’s Third Cohort of 23 Startups”, e27, July 17, 2018,

https://e27.co/sneak-peek-entrepreneur-first-singapores-third-cohort-23-startups-20180717/, accessed April 2021. 2 Michael Tegos, “Entrepreneur First’s Inaugural Singapore Cohort has VR, IoT, Nanosatellites, and More”, TechinAsia, March

24, 2017, https://www.techinasia.com/entrepreneur-first-demo-day-2017, accessed April 2021. 3 Entrepreneur First, “How it Works”, https://www.joinef.com/how-it-works/, accessed April 2021.

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solid background in Enterprise Sales, having worked for the Wall Street Journal. However, this

partnership did not last. After two weeks of working together, Abhilash and Meraj went their

separate ways as they had different visions for Bus Uncle.

Abhilash did not give up. He continued to push on – hoping to find another co-founder soon to

work with him on Bus Uncle. But he encountered little success.

Enhancing and Promoting Bus Uncle

Abhilash had continued to develop Bus Uncle’s features and functionalities while Dylan helped

him with sales and marketing. Dylan also drafted several commercial templates and contracts,

and played a key role in negotiating with clients for the advertising business. However, after

working together for five months, Dylan decided to depart. Though they were good friends, they

could not work well as a team. When he left, Abhilash again had to shoulder the responsibilities

for Bus Uncle end-to-end.

Abhilash continued to receive feedback and input from his users. One important feedback he

received was the absence of the Bus Uncle app on the Apple iOS App Store and Google Android

Play Store. Recognising the missed opportunity, he forked out a few hundred dollars from his

own pocket to hire a freelancer on UpWork4, so that any potential user would be directed to the

chatbot on Facebook Messenger.

In December 2017, Abhilash launched Bus Uncle on Telegram, a social media messaging

platform popular with university students.5 A few months later in March 2018, he launched Bus

Uncle on Google Assistant.6

Starting the Chatbot Business

On 6 November 2017, Abhilash was invited to speak on a panel at the inaugural Singapore

Festival of Disruptors7, an event that was organised by a local crowdfunding site Gofiee, a media

company Sundance Company with GovTech as the supporter. The theme of the event was “Using

artificial intelligence to make real-world connections”.8 By that time, Bus Uncle had amassed

thousands more users and was receiving more than one million messages per month.9 At that

event, Abhilash shared,

I realised that a lot of people started using Bus Uncle because they enjoyed speaking to him

– there’s a human connection. Bus Uncle, which converses with users on Facebook

Messenger, now receives almost a million messages a month. Unlike most chatbots that

follow a linear decision-making process where the user is required to makes choices based

on a fixed sequence of questions, Bus Uncle can take one’s location or desired bus number

as a conversation starter.

4 Upwork was a freelancing platform for companies and individual company owners to find and hire professional talent. 5 Guidesify.com, “Telegram Groups / Bots in Singapore that are Useful for Students”, Guidesify, May 12, 2020,

https://guidesify.com/telegram-groups-bots-in-singapore-that-are-useful-for-students/, accessed April 2021. 6 Information from Abhilash Murthy’s presentation to SMU students on February 22, 2021. 7 GovTech Singapore, “Using Artificial Intelligence to Make Real-world Connections”, GovTech, November 23, 2017,

https://www.tech.gov.sg/media/technews/using-artificial-intelligence-to-make-real-world-connections, accessed April 2021. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.

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He continued,

I see a lot of future in chatbots and I believe natural language processing will become a norm

in chatbots. I also envision chatbots talking to one another, especially to satisfy the user’s

multiple requests, for example, getting suggestions for a meal and ordering a taxi at the same

time.

Impressed by what she had heard, Angelita Teo, Director of National Heritage Board (NHB) and

National Museum of Singapore, wrote to Abhilash immediately after the event. The subject line

of the email was: “Singapore Heritage Aunty?”

The charter of the NHB was to increase Singaporean’s knowledge of the country’s rich heritage,

history and culture. Even though Singapore was often celebrated as a cultural melting pot, many

Singaporeans could not identify with the country’s rich culture and heritage. Despite easy

accessibility and availability of information online, many Singaporeans were not interested to

engage with the content. This was the main reason why the NHB wanted a chatbot that spoke like

Bus Uncle – to provide bite-sized information about Singapore’s unique heritage and interesting

facts about the historical sites.

After several rounds of discussion, Heritage Granny – Singapore’s first “chatbot por por”

(grandmother in Cantonese) was born (see Exhibit 2). Like Bus Uncle, Heritage Granny was fun,

witty and relatable.

Abhilash described Heritage Granny as,

She was like your own grandmother and she had lived long enough to know everything that

was to know about Singapore’s heritage.

On her Facebook page, Heritage Granny10 told her users:

Here's what Granny can do:

📅 Show you a list of ongoing events

🌟 Remember your favourite events (My memory good hor)

🚶 Provide directions to your chosen event. My son, Bus Uncle will help you get there!

If one wanted to know, say, about the “Gan Clan Association” in Chinatown, Heritage Granny

would provide all the information about the genealogy of the surname Gan, which apparently

could be traced back to the imperial line and Confucius!

Abhilash asked one of his good friends to pre-record the responses and create a logical

conversational flow for the chatbot. Heritage Granny was a location-based chatbot. For instance,

if one were to walk along Orchard Road, Heritage Granny would offer interesting stories about

the historical sites along Singapore’s famous shopping paradise road. The chatbot also provided

information about museums, events, monuments and the weather.

Talking to Heritage Granny was like talking to a human being and it was appealing to both adults

and children. Abhilash elaborated,

Heritage Granny created some interesting conversations. The average conversation could

10 Source: Heritage Granny Facebook Page, August 15, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/heritagegranny/posts/668665296842219,

accessed April 2021.

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go on for 3 to 4 minutes to as long as 30 minutes. What was interesting too was that while

the parents might start the conversation with Heritage Granny, they would often pass the

chatbot on to their kids. We know this because the kids would upload voice clips of themselves

saying ‘Hello Granny’.

I was very happy to see the impact of Heritage Granny, especially getting kids interested in

Singapore’s heritage. The chatbot was a great win for the National Heritage Board!

Shortly after completing the Heritage Granny project, Abhilash was approached by Google to

create a voice activated Bus Uncle chatbot for the launch of Google Home on 18 April 201811 to

tell Singaporean-styled jokes for Google Assistant. Given that Bus Uncle already had a library of

jokes, Abhilash leveraged these jokes to create the Google Assistant jokes. This feature on Google

Assistant was made available shortly after the official launch of Google Home. Many other

chatbot opportunities followed as Abhilash’s reputation grew in this space.

Presenting to the Entrepreneur First Investment Committee

While participating in the EF programme, Abhilash presented and tested his chatbot ideas with

the EF community. He constantly received feedback that the business model centred on a chatbot

agency model was not scalable. The EF community suggested that he productise the entire chatbot

development process. Instead of providing customised services and focusing on being an agency

for chatbots, the idea of offering chatbots-as-a-service was conceptualised and planted in his

mind.

Using Airtable12, he built a minimum viable product (MVP) to test out the chatbots-as-a-service

model. With Airtable, Abhilash could store specific responses and conversations in the designated

cells, while also creating a simple logic for the conversational flow, which made it easier to create

conversational chatbots.

Abhilash was given the opportunity to present to the EF Investment Committee on 9 May 2018.

Because he could not find a suitable co-founder to work with him, he presented as a solo-founder

– the first solo-founder to do so at EF. He also became the first solo-founder to obtain an initial

seed funding of S$75,00013 to take his venture forward. He was elated, and added,

I could not believe my ears! I kept asking myself; ‘Did I hear correctly?’ Entrepreneur First

had never invested in any solo-founder before. EF typically invested in start-ups with a

founding team of two people or more.

I was so worried about money. Now I could certainly take a breather as I would be able to

hire my very own developer to start building the chatbots-as-a-service platform.

11 Kevin Kwang, “Google Brings More Hardware to Singapore with Home, Home Mini Launch”, CNA International, April 18,

2018, https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/google-home-mini-singapore-launch-10146028, accessed April 2021. 12 Airtable was an online platform for creating and sharing relational databases that allowed users to organise data in rows and

columns like a spreadsheet. Airtable became Softr when it was awarded US$2.2 million seed funding. For more information, please refer to: Steve O’Hear, “Softr Scores $2.2M Seed for its No-code Website and Web App Platform Powered by Airtable”,

Techcrunch, January 21, 2021, https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/21/softr/, accessed April 2021. 13 S$75,000 = US$56,250 at April 2021.

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What’s Next?

Despite securing the seed funding from EF, Abhilash was concerned about doing it all. He had

not had a lot of success finding a co-founder to partner with. There was so much to do – enhancing

Bus Uncle, building the advertising business, developing chatbots and now, starting the chatbots-

as-a-service business. What should he do next?

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EXHIBIT 1: BUS UNCLE WEBSITE

Source: Bus Uncle Website, https://www.busuncle.sg, accessed April 2021.

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EXHIBIT 2: HERITAGE GRANNY

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Source: Abhilash Murthy, “Presentation to SMU Students”, February 22, 2021.